The Liberalization of Contraception | Mary Harrington

You classified yourself earlier in the podcast as a classic liberal, and so you're tilting to the side of minimally regulated individual freedom as the best strategy for psychological development and long-term social stability. The open question there, of course, is how much that can actually function in the absence of an underlying uniting ethos.

Let me ask you a question related to that: where do you stand with regards to such things as the liberalization of the divorce laws and also with regards to contraception? So, what is all your thinking? Just to clarify, when I said I'm thus far a liberal, that was in the context of my generally describing myself to anybody who asks as a reactionary. So, I'm some distance from being characterized generally speaking as a classical liberal, although I possibly started out there at some point or another.

But you know, as a reactionary—I mean a reactionary feminist, as I’d like to style myself—my stance on no-fault divorce is that it's disastrous. My stance on contraception is that there’s a robust feminist case against the pill. In fact, so much so that I devoted a chapter to it in Feminism Against Progress—the feminist case against the contraceptive pill.

What about other forms of contraception? I mean, there’s a part of me that keeps thinking that maybe the damn Catholics were correct. You know, now that's a thought that I haven't been willing to entertain fully. Well, you know, you can make a case that it might be possible for sensible people to use some intelligence when it comes to family planning. But you know, the evidence that that's the way things have turned out is pretty damn shaky. So, I'm curious about your stance on contraception in general.

I'm very ambivalent on this, to be honest. I think my central objection to the contraceptive pill is its transhumanist characteristic. And so I have a blanket objection to hormonal contraception across the board on that basis. It screws up women at the biochemical level; it screws up relations between the sexes. It affects mate choice. I mean, we’re familiar with the contemporary research on this—it's catastrophic. It’s ecologically catastrophic. It's having a disastrous effect on aquatic life; it's bad across the board. And so there's also an ecological case against the pill, as well as a feminist one.

With the rest of them, I’m more ambivalent about this. I think where you're not breaking something which is working normally, I’m less uncomfortable about contraception than I am with hormonal interventions in our physiology. So I think I’d probably, for now, take a squashy centrist stance on that and say what to me seems the approach most conducive to employing technologies in a way that is ordered to our nature, rather than in revolt against our nature, would probably be some form of fertility tracking in conjunction with a barrier method, for example.

I think that is fairly common practice among not especially radical Roman Catholics, who will use some kind of barrier method or just abstain at the danger points. But to me, really, I think the way forward is not to try and pretend that we can put all of our technologies back in the box, but to try and find constructive ways of reordering those technologies that we have to the realities of our nature, which have not changed.

So I suppose the governing approach that I would advocate on that basis for fertility planning—which is something that women have always sought to do, long before we came up with something like the contraceptive pill—would be to try and employ those technologies that we have in a way that is ordered to our nature and supports our flourishing in accordance with our nature, rather than setting out to wage war on that nature.

So I think that would be my centrist approach to contraception. I guess the question there is how do you distinguish between what's central and what's peripheral, but that's a perfectly reasonable thing to attempt to think through—and I can certainly understand your point. I mean, the pill, the hormonal effects of the pill are much more pervasive than anybody had dared to imagine. They might have disrupted the relationships between men and women—young men and women—on a permanent and quasi-permanent political basis in ways that we can barely begin to understand.

So, I mean, I know, for example, that women on the pill like masculine men less. And you know, that's actually a major problem. You know, we have no idea what the political ramifications of that are.